Narratives of Peace, Conflict, and Justice

By Steve Folk. 

Link to the original blog: https://steven-volk.blog/2017/04/03/global-connections-2-0-or-are-we-up-to-3-0/

The higher ed press has run a number of articles recently on the ways that institutional collaborations can save money by multiplying scarce resources while providing opportunities for students and faculty not normally available on any single campus. Individual faculty have been collaborating with colleagues at other institutions for years, often using readily available and free software (usually Skype) to “bring in” the author of a book the students are currently reading, listening to “on the scene” observations from colleagues living in areas of the world where important events are occurring, or connecting language learners with peers in target language countries.

Beyond this, some faculty have put the time and effort (and often blood, sweat and tears) into developing more intensive collaborations across institutions and national borders because the results, in terms of student learning and personal impact as well as the faculty members’ own professional development, can be so significant. At Oberlin, the “American Democracy” project run by emeriti history professors Carol Lasser and Gary Kornblith, comes to mind.  Beginning in 2010. The project consisted of two parallel partnerships, one between Al Quds University (Palestine) and Oberlin College, and the other between Tel Aviv University (Israel) and Oberlin College. Using a common sourcebook of readings, courses on the American democratic experience were taught in tandem at the three institutions. Besides posting reflections on a joint course management site, students from all three institutions “met” via video conferencing and, for a number of summers, in person in Oberlin.

Certainly, technology plays a large role in bringing widespread communities together. Blogs, Skype, Zoom, or other video conferencing tools make connections possible. But when considering a new generation of collaborations, the main factor should not necessarily (or not only) be the availability of the technology that underlies them, as important as this is, but – as with the American Democracy project – the pedagogic outcomes that make the investment of time and effort worthwhile. Simply put, before launching into collaborations which will demand a lot of your time and – often – resources, you need to be clear that what is to be gained in terms of student learning and one’s own professional engagement.

Global Liberal Arts Alliance

As a way of highlighting the work involved, and the impressive results that can be obtained, I’m going to highlight two projects that arose from collaborations between the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) and the Global Liberal Arts Alliance (GLAA).  Founded in 2009, the GLAA is a partnership of American style liberal arts institutions made up of 29 institutions representing 17 countries including Japan, Nigeria, Lebanon, Egypt, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Morocco, Ghana, India, and Pakistan, among others.

One of the GLAA’s projects is “Global Course Connections,” which links courses taught in two (or more) GLAA campuses in different countries. For example, Zeinab Abul-Magd (History, Oberlin) linked her course on Borders, Wars, and Displacement in MENA with that of a colleague (Amy Austin Holmes) who was teaching at the American University in Cairo. Julie Brodie at Kenyon connected her Modern Dance and Choreography course with Ana Sanchez’s similarly themed course taught at the American College of Greece. (If you’re interested in applying to the program, you can get more information here.)

Narratives of Peace, Conflict, and Justice

LINK TO VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/209283543

Dagmar Kusá (left) and Deirdre Johnston

This collaboration engaged three faculty members: Deirdre Johnston, Professor of Communications at Hope College (Holland, Michigan, USA), Dagmar Kusá, Professor of Political Science at the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) (Bratislava, Slovakia), and Rima Rantisi at the American University in Beirut (Lebanon). The three faculty members developed a collaborative course which they titled, “Narratives of Peace, Conflict and Justice: Transitions in Post-Apartheid South Africa.”  Their collaboration was designed to allow students at the three sites to study processes of peace, conflict and justice in their own countries before bringing them to a new setting, South Africa. In particular, students at Hope College examined the history of race and race relations in the U.S., students at BISLA explored the treatment accorded to the Roma population in Europe, and those in Beirut investigated issues of religion and tribe in Lebanon. Visiting South Africa, a country that was largely unknown to the participants, and witnessing the same kinds of conflicts as in the settings they knew and had studied in their own countries, was quite powerful for the students, particularly as they came to realize how pervasive themes of conflict and the desire for justice were in all human societies.

The “Peace, Conflict and Justice” collaborative is a fine example of lesson that you need to put in the time in order to get at the desired results, and that successful collaborations, understood as those that produce significant learning opportunities for the students and important professional development for faculty, take considerable effort — and produce important rewards.  It took the faculty involved more than two years of work and numerous meetings to elaborate a course structure and theme, develop a common syllabus, and decide on joint readings, film work, and assignments. In the end, they agreed to organize the course around three main goals: (1) Student self-awareness, i.e., opening a process which would allow students to reflect on, and be responsible for, one’s own identity; (2) Awareness of the other, including understanding and coping with one’s stereotypes of those defined as other; and (3) Using narrative approaches to understand the process of identity formation and identity conflicts.

The course was structured on the basis of what they called a laddered, “three-dimensional perspective taking” approach. The first stage involved learning about a source of systematic oppression within one’s own national/historical context (as mentioned above:  race in the United States; the Roma community in Slovakia; and religious oppression in Lebanon). Students gathered background on their domestic systems of oppression, which they then had to teach to students from the other two countries. Through this process of teaching to the other students, they learned that those students also had a perspective on their own domestic context which was not necessarily shared by the foreign students.

Students visiting the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, South Africa

The second stage involved a circular process of seeing oneself as other, in other words, as being complicit within one’s own domestic context of oppression and see others as also complicit in their own domestic contexts. Finally, the travel to South Africa involved students in the process of learning in a “neutral” area, where they were coming “fresh,” i.e., without a history, into the setting.  This led to the sharing of research ideas and carrying out research on the themes developed in the course.

But perhaps the most important impact of the course came after the students returned home as they reflected not just on what they learned by being in South Africa, but what they could do at home to address systems of oppression in their own domestic settings.

The Impact

As with the language-learning collaboration, this one also had a strong impact on the faculty participants’ professional development. By developing a joint syllabus and course framework, they exposed each other to new literatures, new sources, and new approaches to teaching themes that each had been engaged in for years.

Even more, the impact on the students made all the hard work worth it, according to Johnston and Kusá.  On an intellectual level, the students came to understand the complex ways that systems of oppression operated, how the church in South Africa, for example, could both lend institutional support to apartheid and also fight against it. The students also underwent considerable personal transformations. For many students, the topics covered in the course were very personal, having lived through periods of conflict and violence in their own countries. Their discomfort, in fact, was often quite evident to the instructors. But that discomfort also led to greater learning and a realization of the need to take responsibility for one’s own community. One student contemplating leaving Lebanon, for example, decided that she needed to stay to work for those things she understood were important. The faculty described the casual conversations that absorbed the students while traveling, standing at a bus stop or eating in a restaurant, as particularly powerful. Transitional justice, ethical approaches, communism vs. capitalism; models of urban development: all were themes that the students brought up on their own.

Sarah Harvin, a student at Hope College who was a part of the project, spoke, along with Johnston and Kusá at a recent GLCA gathering in Ann Arbor. For her, the most meaningful (and difficult) aspect of the course was using this laddered approach to learning (studying your own identity, seeing yourself as other, and applying lessons learned in a new context). She talked about how difficult it was to reconcile perspectives within one’s own group in order to be able to explain those perspectives to the other two groups of students, particularly as their topic was the history of race and racism in America. But the process of being in South Africa where all three perspectives (U.S., Slovakian, Lebanese) were constantly engage in grappling with a new, and highly complex environment, was invaluable, giving everyone the experience of seeing that history through three lenses simultaneously.

Harvin reported that she had gone on a Hope College trip to Rwanda two years earlier, but, as it was only with other students from her own college, she was never able to get out of what she called the “Hope bubble.” On this trip, however, Hope students traveled with students from other countries with whom they had build up a level of trust, and who, therefore, had no trouble saying, “wait, stop, hold on. That’s your U.S. perspective talking.” Harvin continued, “That for me was good to hear; it was a check on my privilege as an American, as a person with a U.S. passport.” But at the same time she had to reconcile “that privilege with the experience of being underrepresented [African American] in the U.S.” The questions she was left with, “How do those two experiences co-exist? How do I deal with those two different aspects of identity,” questions which were really at the very foundation of the course, clearly continued to resonate among both students and faculty.

You can see a short video about this collaboration here, and an extended video (26:11) here. Finally, click here to see a slide show the participants put together from their South African trip.